New NexusOne Radio Firmware — a glimpse of the world that’s sprung up sharing the latest goodies between countries, carriers, and developers. For everyone for whose products the street has found a new use, the challenge is to harness this energy, enthusiasm, knowledge, and devotion. In terms of cognitive surplus, this far exceeds the 1 LOLCAT minimum standard unit. (via YuweiWang on Twitter)

In a world full of services like delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter — services that can route feeds of data based on user-defined vocabularies — you don’t have to be a programmer to create useful mashups. You just have to understand, and find ways to apply, something Jon Udell calls the “Principle of Informal Contracts.” He expands on the concept in the second part of his elmcity series.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys — a remarkable mashup of historical information and literature in modern technology to make the Pepys diaries an experience rather than an object. It includes historical weather, glosses, maps, even an encyclopedia. (prompted by Jon Udell)

The Tonido Plug Server — one of many such wall-wart sized appliances. This caught my eye: CodeLathe, the folks behind Tonido, have developed a web interface and suite of applications. The larger goal is to get developers to build other applications for inclusion in Tonido’s own app store.

Wikileaks Fails “Due Diligence” Review — interesting criticism of Wikileaks from Federation of American Scientists. “Soon enough,” observed Raffi Khatchadourian in a long profile of WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in The New Yorker (June 7), “Assange must confront the paradox of his creation: the thing that he seems to detest most-power without accountability-is encoded in the site’s DNA, and will only become more pronounced as WikiLeaks evolves into a real institution.” (via Hacker News)

Yahoo Style Guide — a paper book, but also a web site with lots of advice for those writing online.

Learning Languages, URL Mastery, Free as in Life, Heritage Remix

Flash is Not a Right (Ian Bogost) — I worry that we’re losing a sense of diversity in computation. This seems to be happening at both the formal and informal levels. Georgia Tech’s computer science bachelor’s degree doesn’t require a language survey class, for example (although one is offered as an elective). This year in the Computational Media curriculum committee, we’ve been discussing the idea of creating a history of programming languages course as a partial salve, one that would explain how and why a number of different languages and environments evolved. Such a course would explicitly focus on how to learn new languages and environments, since that process is not always obvious. It’s a wonderful and liberating feeling to become familiar with and then master different environments, and everyone truly interested in computing should experience that joy.

Remix American High Style with Polyvore — the greatest challenge to heritage institutions is irrelevance, not penury. Brooklyn Museum is unsurpassed in creating relevance for its collections and its existence, and they do it by reaching out, where people are and not expecting them to come directly to us. If you’re at a gallery, museum, library, or archive and your first reaction is to protect what you’ve got, you’re doing it wrong. Report to Brooklyn for make-up classes. (via auchmill on Twitter)

App Mashes Up Digital Text on Facebook Platform Digital Texts 2.0 is an interesting application for Facebook that lets you group and share digital material. It's intriguing to see cutting edge development occurring in this space. From the Digital Texts 2.0 about page: Digital Texts 2.0 was undertaken by Dr. Stéfan Sinclair as an initiative to experiment with applying…

Digital Texts 2.0 is an interesting application for Facebook that lets you group and share digital material. It's intriguing to see cutting edge development occurring in this space. From the Digital Texts 2.0 about page: Digital Texts 2.0 was undertaken by Dr. Stéfan Sinclair as an initiative to experiment with applying the principles of Web 2.0 to the realm…

"Dilbert" creator Scott Adams and his distributor, United Media, are supporting user-generated content through Dilbert.com. Visitors can rewrite captions and redistribute the results, and the full "Dilbert" archive will eventually be available for free. From Webware: I asked Adams why he and United Media are opening up the Dilbert intellectual property like this, and he sent me a response…